What Mass Shootings and Big Data Have in Common

Producers of guns and data say they aren't responsible for misuse. But it's precisely the dangers that make these industries profitable.

May 10, 2018

In his address to the
National Rifle Association last weekend, President Trump criticized gun-free
zones while his secret service discordantly made the convention a gun-free zone
for his safety. The controversy returned guns to the headlines after a month of
data scandals. Gun control activists might rightly lament the nation’s short
attention span, which shifted outrage to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in
April. But in fact, data privacy and mass shootings are more closely related
than they might first appear. The spring’s twin controversies both come from global
markets in morally questionable goods. And the industries’ histories have
striking similarities.

Those responsible for
the sale of data and guns both disclaim responsibility for the dangerous uses
to which these goods are put, though both are profitable precisely because of
those dangerous activities. The long-frustrated effort to regulate firearms trade,
dating from the nineteenth century, finds an echo in today’s struggle to
regulate the trade in personal data. In both instances, regulation became a
priority only when reckless sale of these goods abroad began to impinge on
security at home. Moreover, just as firearms-makers have long leveraged their
role in national security and industrial prosperity to thwart regulation, so
the concentrated market power of giant tech companies, on whom governments,
economies, and the very flow of information now depend, enables them to avoid
reform.

In the eighteenth
century, the British government helped British firearms-makers cope with
erratic government demand by encouraging them to sell their wares abroad.
British guns flooded the world—through the slave trade in West Africa and the
conquest of South Asia and North America. British officials who expressed fear
about unwittingly arming enemies with British guns were routinely assuaged by
the logic that greater scruple would merely forfeit profit and influence to the
French or the Dutch. Gun-makers also insisted that their goods were
merely commodities like anything else and should not be subject to particular
restrictions.

When powerful anticolonial
movements emerged around the world in the late nineteenth century, the appeal
of this logic waned. British officials belatedly struggled to limit arms
possession among the Irish, Indians, Afghans, South Africans, Maori, and others
it ruled, over the protestations of the British gun industry.

Irish rebels armed with guns did end British rule; bots and guns in
dangerous hands likewise threaten America’s security today.

Firearms
makers continue to require custom to supplement government demand. As gun
controls tighten around the world, American civilians have become a crucial
market, owning
roughly a third of all firearms in the world today. The U.S. federal
government eases these sales by continually obstructing passage of sensible gun
control laws, shielding gun-makers from liability lawsuits—for example, legislation
in 2005 protecting gun dealers and manufacturers from lawsuits should their
products be used in crimes—and exempting guns from regulation by the Consumer
Product Safety Commission.

Like the British in
the eighteenth century, the U.S. government also eases sales of these allegedly
neutral commodities abroad. American arms can be found on all sides of
conflicts around the world. A long global effort to regulate firearms sales has
culminated in the Arms Trade Treaty of 2014, but instead of ratifying the
treaty, the Trump administration plans to ease controls on firearms exports by
moving their oversight from the State Department to the looser jurisdiction of
the Commerce Department, where some sales may not even require licensing. The
announcement this week that Oliver North, notorious government coordinator of
covert arms sales to Iran in the 1980s, will be the NRA’s new president is a
reminder that the firearms industry is part of a wider armaments industry whose
global sales are brokered by governments in the name of jobs and security. Both
the Taliban and ISIS have American arms.

Twentieth-century Silicon Valley was as much a product of government subsidy as the eighteenth-century gun
industry. And online influence is today’s way of projecting power with
arsenals. Bots—phantom stores of power—can sway advertising audiences and
reshape political debates—and determine election outcomes. The American company
Devumi buys bots wholesale from a global market and sells them
to social media companies. It has made millions by
selling Twitter followers and retweets. And for long there has been a remarkable absence of moral or
even political drama around this industry: “Everyone does it,” one actress who
is a Devumi customer told The New York Times in their January exposé—echoing yet another defense of eighteenth-century gun
manufacturers.Just as gun-makers fear forfeiting profit by
scrupling about sales to national enemies, today’s social media firms fear
forfeiting profit and prestige by eliminating fake accounts; their market value
is tied to the number of people using their services.

Now, however, some lawmakers are calling for more regulation of
social media companies, in the wake of revelations of Russia-aligned hackers
deploying bots to influence American politics.

Russia-linked
bots have particularly distorted the gun control debate. Revelations that thousands of bot posts had claimed Parkland
survivors were paid actors prompted Facebook and YouTube to promise to
crackdown on trolls. But the falsehoods continue to proliferate. Meanwhile, in
April, YouTube headquarters in Silicon Valley itself became the
site of a mass shooting.

British officials belatedly cracked down on arms trading out of
the fear of armed Irish and Indian rebels; the 2014 Arms Trade Treaty was
likewise fueled by fears of firearms in the hands of terrorists and insurgents.
In both cases, the driving concern was to keep arms out of the wrong hands, not
the ethical dubiousness of the trade itself. Now, having armed the other side
in an information war, social media companies and the government agencies that
have fostered them are scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, too.

But
both industries have proved resistant to reform efforts, with calls for change often
eliciting rhetorical commitments without denting the legislative and business
infrastructure that sustains them.

For instance, responding
to public pressure after Parkland, JP Morgan’s chief financial officer affirmed
that the company’s links to manufacturers of military-style weapons for
civilians (like the AR-15) “have come down significantly and are pretty
limited.” But JP Morgan’s asset management arm is now among the primary owners
of the AR-15 manufacturer Remington, which will emerge from bankruptcy
proceedings this month—the gunmaker thrived thanks to panic-buying triggered by
fears of increased gun control under President Obama but slumped as those
purchases diminished under the solidly pro-NRA President Trump. Neither JP
Morgan’s proclamations nor the bankruptcy proceedings have affected Remington’s
manufacturing operations. Indeed, the proceedings bought the company time in facing down a lawsuit by the
families of the victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in the
Connecticut Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, tax
dollars continue to fund government contracts for the very gunmakers activists
seek to hold accountable for the scourge of mass shootings.

The theater around Congress’s
questioning of Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg in April, which pushed Parkland from the front pages, likewise addressed
public anger without resulting in concrete steps towards regulatory
legislation. It is difficult for companies and government agencies invested in
the health of Silicon Valley to gainsay the logic of profit. Marketing and
gaming companies, insurance and law firms, suppliers, employees—so many depend on
the continued sale of bots and guns, whatever the ethical dilemmas they pose as
commodities. Even the art world thrives off major
donations from gun-makers who simultaneously fill the coffers of the
NRA.

Bots and AR-15s are dangerous objects, not the neutral
commodities imagined in theories of free-trade capitalism. In 1807, though it
allowed British guns to flow around the world, the British government did
abolish the slave trade, despite many vested interests, out of a sense that
humans were not a morally defensible “commodity”: Some goods should simply not
be sold. If the ethical argument is not compelling on its own, the Realpolitik
one may be: Irish rebels armed with guns did end British rule; bots and guns in
dangerous hands likewise threaten America’s security today.